Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document management server that manages documents, a document management method, and a non-transitory storage medium storing a program.
Description of the Related Art
In a document management system constituted by a document management server and a plurality of clients, the server receives a request from a client and transmits information on a requested document to the client. There is also a system disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-222237 in which a server generates image data (display data) of a requested document and transmits the image data to a client so that the image data is displayed, thereby enabling the content of the document to be displayed in a general-purpose browser of the client.
In such a document management system, there is a case where a document management server repeatedly receives requests for the same document from a plurality of clients. In order to deal with this, it is considered that a function configured to accumulate image data of this document as reusable data (hereinafter referred to as cache data) is provided in the server so as to enable quick responses to requests for the same document.
In a system disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-076257, cache data of an information entity is accumulated so that the cache data may be searched for by using meta information, and it may also be detected whether or not the cache data of the information entity has already been accumulated by using a meta information table in which the meta information is stored.
However, as in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-076257, a technique of referring to cache data by using a table requires an area for storing the table, thereby resulting in consumption of physical resources (hereinafter referred to as resources).
Also, every time new image data generated in response to a request from a client is stored as cache data, the table has to be updated, and thus this may have some effect on the speed of a process of responding to a client.
In addition, a procedure is performed in which it is checked whether or not applicable meta information exists within the meta information table, and when the meta information exists, cache data is searched for by using cache data storage location information written in the meta information so as to acquire the cache data. Hence, it takes some time to check the presence or absence of cache data.